24 is a truck, driven by a lieutenant of field artillery in Germany, named Go Chll1b a Tree Departll1ent. Good luck, Lieutenant, and for tree read linden. . I NCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE: Serving the sll1all ll1inds of Washington is a nursery school called the Congressional and Tiny Tots School. One of the coatroom attendants at the Harvard Club is reading "The Di- . C d " VIne oll1e y. At Fort Benning, a tell1porary build- ing bears a stark little sign that says, "This building will burn in fifteen ll1in- utes. " The Unfasllionable Body I F you follow our advice, you'll find time to visit the current exhibition at the 1\;luseum of Modern Art. It is entitled "Are Clothes Modern?" and the answer, as you would prob- ably have guessed, is No. The whole affair was designed, staged, and is be- ing brooded on and patted into shape by Mr. Bernard Rudofsky, a slight, in- tense Viennese architect who has spent a large part of the past fourteen years, a period during which he ll1USt have had plenty of other things to worry about, worrying about clothes. Mr. Rudofsky thinks the clothes people, male and fe- ll1ale, wear are uneconoll1ical, irration- al, unaesthetic, and, not to put too fine a point on it, bad. In the exhibition he doesn't attell1pt to preach much in the way of reform, because, as he told us the day it opened, he's idealistic enough to believe that once people realize how unhealthy their clothing is a change is hound to COll1e. "E ven WOll1en will wear cheap, sensible clothes, sensibly draped," Mr. Rudofsky said, which goes to show how far idealisll1 will carry a ll1 an. We spent a pleasant hour wandering about the exhibition, which is divided into ten general sections-The U nfash- ionable Human Body, Excess and Su- perfl uity , Trousers Versus Skirts, The Desire to Conform, Posture Causes and Effects, The Abuse of Materials, Wis- dOll1 in Period and Folk Dress, All1er- ican Pioneers, The Revival of the Ra- tional, and The DOll1estic Background of Clothing. That list ll1ay give you some idea ùf the thoroughness of Mr Rudofsky's work, which runs from a comparison of a cave-dweller's drawing of the fell1ale body with a sketch in Harper's Bazaar-you can't tell them apart, and they both look terrible- through whalebone corsets and bustles up to and including a G.I. blouse, of which Mr. Rudofsky approves. He points out, all10ng other things, that ll10desty is conditioned by age, habit, CUStOll1, law, epoch, time of day, country, surround- ings, and clill1a ' te, and doesn't amount to a dall1ned thing; in this country dancers cover their breasts and pelvises, in Asia they cover their arms and legs. Fòur plaster figures, designed by Mr. Rudofsky and executed by Costantino Nivola, are intended to show a wOll1an's body as it would have had to be shaped in order to fit the dresses of four fashion periods. The figures represent the concave, boyish forll1 of the Scott Fitzgerald era, the Grecian Urn forll1 of circa 1 91 0, the dowager form of the nineties on ward -distinguished by a sloping plane surface known to Mr. Rudofsky as the mono-bosoll1-and a shape which, being of the bustle period, proved to possess too large a posterior to be successfully cantilevered and is consequently modelled as a centaur. Blooll1ers are cOll1plill1en ted as a step in the right direction, and much is ll1ade of the late Dr. Jäger's five-toed socks and stockings. The final section of the exhibi- tion is devoted to Mr. Rudofsky's ideas of how a properly designed house can af- fect clothing. He thinks, for exall1ple, that, like some of the Oriental peoples, we should take off our shoes at the front door and pad cozily about the house on our bare feet; if floors were made of heated, resilient, plastic panels, we would presull1ä:bly feel as light and airy as if we had had a couple of double Martinis. Mr. Rudofsky told us that he started out as a philologist and ended up as an architect merely because friends talked him into signing up for some courses they were taking at the T ech- nische Hochschule in Vienna. He has ,-:-., \ ! . ,; I! jI' 1'1 I', III'; III ','\1 1 , 'If ,\ j \\ì ,{ \ l:- i J .- :"", ---' ,;/ "'. , \, (\ DECEMßEI\ 9, 19 ++ practiced architecture in Vienna, Berlin, Naples, the Balkans, and South All1er- ica, and a house he designed a few years ago in Brazil has been described by cus- tOll1arily reserved critics as "the ll10st beautiful house in the Western Hell1i- sphere." He and his wife came to New York in 1941, and they recently applied for their first citizenship papers. When we spoke to hill1 at the 1\;1 useUll1, he was wearing an ordinary double-breasted brown suit and store shirt and shoes, hut by preference, and at hOll1e, he goes about naked, and so does Mrs. Rudofsky. V?hile living in Italy, he and his wife hired a Swiss maid, who was at first deeply shocked to see her ell1- ployers wandering naked around the house and yard. As the ll10nths went by, however, she began to strip, and by the end of a year she was waiting on table as bare as the day she was born and not giving it a second thought. V oyage to Africa T HIS is one of those monumental Inilitary mixups which only the favorable progress of the war justifies our telling-or, as people used to be so fond of saying, it couldn't happen in Gerll1any. Anyway, something over a year ago a hurry call was received from England for Arll1Y ll1ail clerks to handle Christll1as parcels. Imll1ediately, all over this country, the order went out that soldiers trained as ll1ail clerks were to be detached and sent to a certain port of ell1barkation. Fort 1\;10nll1outh con- tributed fifty of them. These fellows all happened to COll1e froll1 the 803 rd Signal Company . To their astonish- ll1ent, they were not IUll1ped in with the other mail clerks and sent to England but were shipped off to Africa as soon as they reached the port. When they got there they were sent to a call1p for cas- uals and each man was issued a bugle. At this point it becall1e clear that the classification clerks at the port of em- barkation had got the men's COll1pany nUll1ber ll1ixed up with the code nUll1ber indicating their special skill, and that froll1 then on they had been handled as 803s, or buglers, instead of 05 6s, or ll1ail clerks. The Arll1Y's solution of this mixup, by the way, was to send all fifty ll1ail clerks to a buglers' school in Africa Our Own Baedeker P REWAR Tokio ill1pressed Noel Coward as "a sad scrap heap of a city," but you know Noel Coward. .L S